


Shell Game Bits and Pieces

by ivorygates



Series: No Quarter [9]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, M/M, Multi, Random & Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-23
Updated: 2006-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-18 12:58:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17581301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: Bits and pieces post "Shell Game".  Mostly Porn.





	Shell Game Bits and Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Notes: I write out of order, and a lot of the time I write little snippets of scenes essentially as notes to myself. Some of them make it into the final version, some don't.
> 
>  
> 
> Title Of The Song: The (internal) titles of the various pieces were mostly for use by Word, which insists that every file have a unique name (although, unlike Wordstar the dearly-lamented, it does not itself generate file names that are bizarre forms of alpha-numerical gibberish). Some of these titles almost make sense, too, though I confess to having no idea (now) why I named the one set of scenes "Brownies". I mean, I know brownies actually figure into a part of it but...surely that isn't the whole reason?
> 
> PS: If some of this looks familiar it is probably because I cannibalized it from/for other drafts.
> 
> PPS: This will make more sense if you've read "Shell Game" first. Maybe.

1\. CARE AND FEEDING (Set before they buy the house and move out of the SGC)

"She has nightmares," Daniel says. "Bad ones."

O'Neill looks at him. The Jackson Twins both have a habit of starting a conversation in the middle—Danny did too; apparently it's a universal constant—but if it's important enough, they'll eventually circle back around to the beginning and let you catch up.

He and Daniel are standing in his kitchen. She and Carter are in the living room. Time to get the Doctors Jackson settled into a real house; Carter and Dani are looking at listings. It's a pointless exercise—the actual search is going to involve the real-estate agent that they're meeting later today—but Carter likes to shop. And apparently Dani either does too, or figured he and Daniel needed some alone time.

"I figure you both have reasons to," O'Neill says. He wonders if he'll ever get the day-to-day details about what they went through.

Daniel shrugs. "She had them before." _Before the Furlings._ "Back when she was on SG-1. Not during missions. After they were over. They're pretty constant now."

O'Neill raises an eyebrow. The two of them don't tell on each other. He wonders why he and Daniel are having this conversation.

"She wakes up screaming. Hitting. If you're going to sleep with her, you'll need to know."

O'Neill nods. That he's going to go back to sleeping with Dani is, well, pretty obvious. The two of them, she and Daniel, are going to be moving off-Base in a couple of days. It will be possible then.

"Don't think she'll tell me?"

"She might. She might think she won't have them." Daniel takes a deep breath. "With you."  


###

2\. JACK/DANIEL/DANI (This could even be a lead-in to "Brownies", and probably would be if I were fleshing these bits out.)

Her life has taught her how to vanish in plain sight. It's not really about invisibility. It's about making people feel they don't need to look at you. After a while, they stop. Even Jack, who is always preternaturally aware of every living thing around him.

Jack-not-Jack, the eternal unspoken counterweight to her life, to Daniel's; it's not as if it's something she'll ever forget. This man (closer than kin) is a stranger; the history he knows does not match her memory (she thinks of Danny, a man she would have liked to know, a man whose close-echo she may well even have met along the road that led her here; the man born to belong here, who died so she and Daniel could survive here.) Most of the time it is a simple matter to push the not-Jackness of Jack down deep, to pretend that this Earth (the last one she will ever know; home) is somehow her own, rebuilt, reborn. Not when she sees him turn toward Daniel, turning as a flower seeks the sun.

It is too feminine a simile—Jack is not flowerlike at all; Jack is entirely masculine—but it contains the central sense of what she wishes to express; a tropism. Jack is her lover. Jack is Daniel's lover as well. And in her own world, in her own place, had she been born a Daniel instead of a Danielle, Jack would never have turned toward her with that same avid _awareness_. It is a normal part of her world (not taken for granted, when she has looked into the eyes of so many Jack O'Neills and it has been absent, but normal), and to find it here (again, at last) has been a relief (something to hold on to, something to anchor her to a world that she must make home, for herself, for Daniel).

But she is not the only one that Jack looks upon with love and lust, and if that tells her this is not home (for values of 'home' including 'dimensions dead and gone in which you were born') then it tells Daniel the same, for in his world, his place, he would have had to have been born a Danielle instead of a Daniel to spark this same awareness.

It does not matter.

Invisible, but not absent, she can watch them together.

###

  
SHELL GAME: BROWNIES (Takes place after the end of Shell Game.)

Daniel's hands are large and strong. His body has been toughened by hard manual labor on the score of worlds they fled across together; sculpted in his slavery.

_He's beautiful, isn't he?_

There are so many different ways to love each other. She isn't thinking of the physical right now, but the emotional interconnections. There are times that she wonders if they—she and Jack—both love Daniel most of all.

At this precise moment Daniel's lying face-down in the middle of the bed. Absolutely out (because of what they've done to him, with him, _for_ him) and breathing deeply, face buried in the pillow. She can see the entire sweep of him, broad shoulders tapering to narrow hips, tight rise of buttocks. His skin is flawless. Flawlessness is just another scar, she knows that, but it has a perverse loveliness. Especially when it's Daniel. She'd like to touch him, but he might wake up. So she doesn't. She just looks.

#

There are two pans of brownies cooling in the kitchen. One with walnuts and chocolate chips, one plain. A bowl of frosting, too, the kind you make with pounds of sugar and chocolate and butter, and which probably qualifies as its own form of slow-acting poison, but since it will take at least thirty years to kill him, he'll take that hit. Daniel woke up this morning deciding he wanted to cook, which is fine with O'Neill. He's got the most highly-educated kitchen staff on Earth.

The most lethal, too.

He's not thinking about Daniel. Daniel is damned good at self-defense, and works hard at it. He's fast with a gun, and both of them are nothing short of amazing with a quarterstaff, actually. Daniel has the advantage there: the weapon's really designed to take advantage of upper body strength, and there men win out over women every time.

But in an all-out fight, you'll have to kill Dani to stop her.

Probably it wasn't that way once.

Of course, he'll never know what she was like before. Never know what Daniel was like, for that matter. Now the two of them circle each other like a binary pair. Scratch one and the other one bleeds. Try to come between them, and god help you.

They've done a good job of settling in at the SGC. More difficult for Daniel, because of the resemblance to Danny. And the fact that comparisons are being made. Including the inevitable one: _at least this one's not gay._

Daniel's done a good job of not laughing in their faces (though he can't exactly parade the heterosexual sex he's having). Everyone assumes he thinks of Dani (chastely, _sans peur et sans reproche)_ as his sister. It's logical. (It's just not the truth.) From the beginning, the two of them trusted him with their biggest secret, just as he trusted both of them. Odd, in one way. Inevitable, in another. They all knew each other, even when they barely knew each other at all.

###

  


CHERRY ON TOP (Also after Shell Game. Six months or so? Probably. And starting in the middle, which I always do in a first draft.)

"I know you fuck," Jack points out reasonably. Because Daniel does Dani. He's watched them. So it's a reasonable extrapolation that Daniel's topped at least once in a while. Danny never did. Never had, never would. _'I'm a pushy bottom. It's a lifestyle choice.'_

Daniel stares at him as if his eyes have gone gold and glowy: well, it isn't horror and rejection, but his brain isn't taking messages right now. "You want me to—"

"Fuck him," the other half of Jack's porno fantasy says brightly. "Up the ass." Well she likes pushing Daniel's buttons, especially in bed, but she's confused now, he can hear it in her voice.

"What?" he asks, running his fingers down Daniel's chest (Dani's behind him) "Think real men don't do things like that?" Daniel's eyes flicker. Jack likes pushing Daniel's buttons too. "Or like it?" he adds. "You do."

He watches Daniel run the one-sided conversation through his head, starting with _'That's different',_ and catching the logical fallacy that would immediately imply that he—Daniel—was not (therefore) a real man. They teach you how to think at OCS, even though Jack would virtuously deny it. He has no trouble running this one down.

"I didn't think you did that," Daniel finally says, settling for the safest and most neutral possible answer.

"Not for a while," Jack agrees.

"Danny didn't pitch," Dani says, because Danny isn't off-limits any more. They talk about him sometimes, just as they talk about the other people in their pasts, and sometimes even Sha're and Charlie, and sometimes they bring Danny to bed. He's not quite sure where Dani gets all of her information, though. Maybe she talks to Carter. He doesn't have to worry about Carter's discretion.

"But," Daniel says.

"'Nights of Hercules and the love of tigers,'" Dani says helpfully. (Verlaine. Danny had been surprised Jack knew of him. He explained that the U.S. Air Force wanted you to be a gentleman as well as an officer.) She rests her chin on Jack's shoulder and runs her hand down over his stomach. He grabs her wrist before her hand gets where it's headed.

"Behave, or I'm sending you to some other room," he says. "It's on the table, Daniel."

Daniel has sex inside his head. First, always. Sometimes—unless Jack can prevent it—instead. He's trying out the idea, seeing if it works for him, and apparently it does, because he's got that sleepy look now that means he's thinking about getting off, and he's getting hard.

"Um," Daniel says. "Yeah."

"I could leave," Dani says. Low, in his ear. Offering them privacy.

"Stay," Jack says, because the two of them both, always (even when nearly inarticulate), say exactly what they mean with absolute precision. She said she _could_ leave, not that she _should_ leave, or needed to leave, or had to leave.

And Daniel moves into his arms, full body press, and Dani slides her hand out from between them so that she can stroke both of them. She's possessive. But since she's equally possessive of both of them, it works out.

#

[gap here because I always leave the sex scenes for last.] 

#

Daniel sits back, rumpled and dazed and looking smug. Still hard. O'Neill figures he should be a gentleman and pass him the lube, but Dani swings her leg sideways and taps the back of Daniel's foot with her ankle, and Daniel straightens up and uncurls and shucks the condom as he lies back and then rolls over and onto her.

There's no foreplay at all.

She hitches herself up, locking her heels over the backs of Daniel's thighs, and O'Neill can smell her, hear the wet sucking sound Daniel's cock makes moving in her. And watching them together is hot, even though there's nothing he's in any condition to do about it, or wants to do about it really, except watch them and take mental notes and wish it weren't suicidally stupid to think of getting them on film. And it's also sweet in a weird way, because they're here, and they're safe.

Dani turns her face toward him, watching him watch them, and he smiles at her. She holds out her hand, reaching for him, and he holds her hand as Daniel thrusts into her, and she and Daniel talk, intermittently and breathlessly, in a language O'Neill doesn't know.

After Daniel comes—head thrown back and gasping softly; he always sounds as if he's just about to ask a question and forgets it halfway through—she lies between them and finishes herself, pressed against his side as Daniel strokes her stomach.

###

SHELL GAME PORN PART II:

The first time both of them make love to him (he uses the polite words even in his thoughts) at the same time it's like being hit by a truck.

A really nice, really determined truck.

Which is funny, in a way—at least in the parts, before and after, when he can do funny. Because there's this argument he never has with them and is _still_ always losing over who they think he is, and it's sure not one they're ever going to have out loud, because it would just get embarrassing, and maybe even annoying, but sometimes when they look at him, even now, they look the way he's damned sure the _Goa'uld_ wish their flunkies would look at them, and he's just not that guy.

He consoles himself—in his more philosophical moments—with telling himself that it isn't that. It's love—that's okay—and the fact that he represents home-in-a-familiar-place.

(Sometimes he even believes himself.)

It's going on February now. A little over four months here as citizens (they still aren't used to reckoning time in either months or weeks again yet; they count everything in days) and they've had their first Christmas here, and that was hard. His second Christmas without Danny.

Dani gave him a picture of Danny to replace all the ones he burned. God knows where she got it or what she'd said to get it. In the photo, Danny's sitting on the hood of that ridiculous sports-car he adored, bare-chested—so it's summer—looking off to the side. He's parked at the side of a road; there's red desert in the background, and it's just twilight. That means Carter took the picture; if O'Neill had been fooling around with a camera at that light-level there wouldn't be any picture at all.

Daniel gives him a picture of the two of them—him and Dani—standing together on the back deck of their new house, proud homeowners. O'Neill took it at Thanksgiving. When the picture was taken, he and Daniel were already lovers. Their actual relationship—the relationship among all three of them—is something they never talk about. Carter called Daniel and Dani 'brother' and 'sister', the day O'Neill took the picture. Daniel flinched and Dani's eyes went absolutely flat, but fortunately nobody but O'Neill saw. Danny only hid one thing, for O'Neill's sake, but the two of them hide nearly everything, except the things that they display so that they can all hide something else.

The other thing Daniel gives him at Christmas is a bottle of Scotch that's nearly as old as they are. And they put both pictures on his mantle, and open the bottle, and talk about Danny.

That's Christmas.

At New Year's there's dancing—party at Peterson, duty and fun combined, the usual uneasy mix. Carter's going with her latest victim; she's started dating again; everything's better now, and on half a whim he asks Dani to go, because Carter wants Frasier for company, and Frasier thinks that Daniel would make a safe and stylish escort, and everything will be neater that way.

Dani's a good dancer, just like Danny. It's no surprise; and he makes some offhand remark about the club scene, because he knew Danny missed being able to dance. And she starts to cry—she's as startled by it as he is—and he walks her off into a corner for privacy and Daniel joins them and explains that Dani learned to dance so she could teach Teal'c, because Teal'c taught her to fight Jaffa-style. And Daniel wipes her face, and Frasier comes over and takes Dani off to the bathroom to fix up her makeup, and a few minutes later he sees Carter follow them. Women hunt in packs.

"It's hard being back, sometimes," Daniel says. Not back in their own world. They know this isn't that. Just back somewhere normal. Somewhere close to safe.

They could all be completely safe—could be safer—if they gave up what none of them intends to give up.

A lot of the time—most of the time—the three of them are in bed together. He keeps his house thoroughly swept, and he's taught them what to look for in theirs. Surveillance isn't really likely, and none of them have found anything yet, but none of them ever stops looking, and he sweeps their house every time he comes to visit.

The mathematics of sex-with-three could verge on a porn movie, but neither of them is really interested in that, and he isn't either. Both of them in bed at the same time is interesting enough.

###


End file.
